Monday, January 24, 2011

Giganews today became the first Usenet provider in the world to reach 900 days of newsgroups retention! Just two years ago, the best provider had 240 days of retention. That provider was Giganews.

Increasing retention by over 350% isn't easy, but we enjoy the technical challenge. More people than ever before are posting more discussions, photos, and other content to Usenet. Over the past two years, the Usenet feed has grown from 5 TB/day to 9 TB/day. A graph of the Usenet feed is below:

The simple solution is to add more hard disks, and we certainly added thousands of those. Giganews also heavily invests in developing our software to handle such high retention levels. We want the fastest Usenet service, so we've designed our Usenet clusters to treat all retention equally. When you download from Giganews, the day-900 article downloads just as fast as yesterday's article. Our software makes this possible by spreading our newsgroup articles around and finding the fastest, best-performing source on our worldwide cluster. While some might try to match our retention, none matches our speed or reliability.

So please, enjoy the 900 days (and growing) of newsgroups retention we offer. As Usenet continues to grow, we'll continue to focus on providing the best access available.

It's awesome what you've done over there at Giganews. I've used you for a long time and will continue to do so. I have a suggestion for another way you could distinguish yourselves from others, although I'm sure it would be difficult: scan and remove posts with viruses. This would make your users much happier, free up HDD space on your servers, and reduce worldwide botnet and spam problems. Just a suggestion.